A caution belongs at the top of this entry. David Parker Ray was never convicted of a single murder, no victim's body was ever recovered, and the figure of sixty deaths that attaches to his name in almost every account comes from an unrecorded remark attributed to an investigator. What he was convicted of is bad enough and is established: the abduction, imprisonment and prolonged sexual torture of women.
He was born in Belen, New Mexico, on November 6, 1939, raised largely by a grandfather, and worked for years as a park maintenance mechanic at Elephant Butte Lake State Park. He married four times. He lived in a mobile home outside Elephant Butte, and beside it he built out a windowless trailer over several years, fitting it with a gynaecological examination table, restraints, surgical and electrical instruments, mirrors on the ceiling, and pulleys. He called it his toy box.
He worked with accomplices, among them his girlfriend Cynthia Hendy and, in one prosecution, his daughter Glenda. A woman would be drugged or taken off the street, wake in the trailer collared and chained, and be played a recorded audio tape in Ray's own voice explaining calmly what was going to be done to her over the following weeks and that she would be returned with no memory of it. He used drugs and hypnosis in an attempt to make that true, which is one reason so few complaints were ever made. The trailer is where the Toy-Box Killer name comes from, and it is the one part of the popular account that rests on something physical.
One was made. In 1997 Angelica Montano got away and reported him to police in Truth or Consequences, and nothing was done. On March 22, 1999, Cynthia Vigil escaped from the trailer wearing an iron collar and a chain, stabbed Hendy with an icepick, and ran into a neighbour's house naked. A third woman, Kelli Garrett, was identified afterwards; she had been dumped by a roadside in 1996 with her throat cut and had survived, and her own husband had not believed her.
He was tried three times. The first trial ended hung, and he was convicted in 2000 and again in 2001 of kidnapping, criminal sexual penetration and conspiracy, and sentenced to 224 years. In 2002 he agreed to a deal, to be transferred to a state prison in exchange for telling investigators where bodies were. He died of a heart attack in custody on May 28, 2002, days before he was due to talk.